An Eve Poem

Aspects of Eve
Linda Pastan

To have been one
of many ribs
and to be chosen.
To grow into something
quite different
knocking finally
as a bone knocks
on the closed gates of the garden --
which unexpectedly
open.

For Dan

Fresh
Naomi Shihab Nye (from her book You & Yours)

To move
cleanly.
Needing to be
nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
from the store.
To lift something
you already had
and set it down
in a new place.
Awakened eye
seeing freshly.
What does that do to
old blood moving through
its channels?

Another from Linda Pastan

What We Want
Linda Pastan

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names --
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

Found this one in my daily Writer's Almanac

Hitchhiker
by Galway Kinnell


After a moment, the driver, a salesman
for Travelers Insurance heading for
Topeka, said, "What was that?"
I, in my Navy uniform, still useful
for hitchhiking though the war was over,
said, "I think you hit somebody."
I knew he had. The round face, opening
in surprise as the man bounced off the fender,
had given me a look as he swept past.
"Why didn't you say something?" The salesman
stepped hard on the brakes.
"I thought you saw,"I said.
I didn't know why. It came to me
I could have sat next to this man all the way
to Topeka without saying a word about it.
he opened the car door and looked back.
I did the same. At the roadside,
in the glow of a streetlight, was a body.
A man was bending over it. For an instant
it was myself, in a time to come,
bending over the body of my father.
The man stood and shouted at us, "Forget it!
He gets hit all the time!" Oh.
A bum. We were happy to forget it.
The rest of the way, into dawn in Kansas,
when the salesman dropped me off,
we did not speak,
except, as I got out, I said, "Thanks,"
and he said, "Don't mention it."


"Hitchhiker" by Galway Kinnell, from Imperfect Thirst. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.

Picking Up Poems Again

Wildflowers
Linda Pastan (from her book Carnival Evening)

You gave me dandelions.
They took our lawn
by squatter's rights --
round suns rising
in April, soft moons
blowing away in June.
You gave my lady slippers,
bloodroot, milkweed,
trillium whose secret number
the children you gave me
tell. In the hierarchy
of flowers, the wild
rise on their stems
for naming.
Call them weeds.
I pick them as I
picked you,
for their fierce,
unruly joy.

Snowstorm

Snowstorm (from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998)
Linda Pastan

Just watching is enough,
as if the eyes were two headlamps,
the body a stalled vehicle
in all this whiteness;
and every space is filled
and filled again with the silence
of pure geometry.
Until, as in a blink, the clouds
part, the fuse

of the sun ignites a passion
of melting, a roar
down the rooftiles,
and here comes the world
as it was, untransformed,
ordinary; and I am still
at the window, full
of a cold knowledge
I hardly understand.

Homage to Coffee

Air Freshener
Sandi J. Holland

Brown bubbles skate across
the smooth, scalding surface,
and cluster at the lip
of the hot mug of dark brew.
They jostle each other,
and murmur steamy coffee stories.
Each anxious
to be the first to burst,
and flick her rich, pungent scent
into the crisp, clean air
of early morning.

William Carlos Williams' Poem for a Monday

The Attic Which Is Desire (from his Selected Poems)
William Carlos Williams

the unused tent
of

bare beams
beyond which

directly wait
the night

and day --
Here

from the street
by

***
*S*
*O*
*D*
*A*
***

ringed with
running lights

the darkened
pane

exactly
down the center

is
transfixed.

~

Poem
William Carlos Williams

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

2 for 1: a Collins and a Young

The Lodger
Billy Collins
from his book The Trouble with Poetry

After I have beaten my sword into a ploughshare,
I beat my ploughshare into a hoe,
then I beat the hoe into a fork,
which I used to eat my dinner alone.

And when I had finished dinner,
I beat my fork into a toothpick,
which I twirled on my lips
then flicked over a low stone wall

as I walked along the city river
under the clouds and stars,
quite happy but for the thought
that I should have beaten that toothpick into a shilling

so I could a buy a newspaper to read
after climbing the stairs to my room.

~

Jetty
Lauren Young

We tiptoe from rock to rock
on the 1st Street jetty
in the darkness, lights
glowing from the boardwalk.

Our feet flex to grip the slickest boulders,
arms out like gull wings.
Our skirts ruffle in the briny
breeze.

The air is sticky,
sea spray misting my glasses,
flip-flops forked in the V
of my fingers.

The soft roar of the waves
beckons us out past the sandbar
to the very tip.

A gaggle of girls,
giggling until we spot the sign
prohibiting climbing onto the jetty,
we scurry
back to shore.

A Pablo Neruda Poem

Ode to My Socks
Pablo Neruda

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.